High-end Captivate Tips and Tricks

Monday

Joe Ganci, Dazzle Technologies Corp.

10:30 - 11:30am

Adobe Captivate is a feature-rich application for creating e-learning and many of its more powerful features are not well-known. It is very popular for a good reason. With Captivate, you can create software and soft skills simulations quickly, but you can also create e-learning from scratch that is interactive, interesting and that allows for branching and customization! Learn some of the best advanced features of the latest version of Captivate from an Adobe Certified Captivate Expert, Joe Ganci, who has used Captivate for many years. Be prepared to learn quickly and a lot!

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• To extend Captivate's capabilities further than they think possible
• To create robust decision branching and personalization
• To work with variables and actions in a way that truly increases the power of Captivate e-learning applications

RoboHelp Authoring - Consistency Made Simple

Monday

Neil Perlin, Hyper/Word Services

12:45 - 1:45pm

If you're part of a multi-developer doc group that uses RoboHelp, or even as a sole writer, you know how hard it is to create and follow standards for consistency. But RoboHelp has features that make that process surprisingly simple; this session explains how - how to create the smallest number of project control files in the least amount of time before you start your projects. In other words, it's easy enough to create standards that there's no excuse not to. This session discusses the concepts behind and creation of three primary standards control files - topic templates, a style sheet, and a table style sheet.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• What constitutes a basic set of project control files in RoboHelp
• How to create three major control files - topic templates, style sheets, and table style sheets
• How to share those control files across multiple projects and developers

Integrating RoboHelp and FrameMaker Using Adobe's Technical Communication Suite 2

Monday

Kevin Siegel, IconLogic, Inc. • Hands-on, Double Session

2:05 - 4:25pm

Technical Communicators have long been in search of a single sourcing strategy that will save time, increase efficiency and eliminate redundancy. Adobe's Technical Communication Suite 2 is the answer! Attend this hands-on, highly interactive session and learn how to author your content in Adobe FrameMaker to create effective print documentation and PDFs; and then how to single source your content into RoboHelp to create engaging help systems and knowledge bases.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• How to Format a Word Document for Import into FrameMaker
• How to Create FrameMaker Books and Indexes
• How to Create and Manage CSS files in RoboHelp
• How to Link a FrameMaker Book Into a RoboHelp Project
• How to Edit the FrameMaker Document Settings
• How to Map Styles
• How to Control Topic Pagination
• How to Edit FrameMaker Content
• How to Add an Associated FrameMaker TOC and Index in RoboHelp
• How to Create FrameMaker Cross-References That Lead to RoboHelp Hyperlinks

Single Sourcing with Flare

Tuesday

Neil Perlin, Hyper/Word Services • Hands-on, Double Session

8:30 - 10:50am

Flare has powerful single sourcing features that sometimes overwhelm new authors. This hands-on session will help put those features into context in order to help new authors decide which to use. The session first lists and describes the features that directly or indirectly support single sourcing - obvious ones like variables and conditions and less obvious or less familiar ones like style sheet mediums. Attendees will then experiment with three of the features - style sheet mediums that let authors easily apply one CSS to different outputs, the target editor that lets authors cull different settings from one project in order to create tailored outputs, and the relationship and potential synergy between variables, snippets, and conditionality. (We'll also look briefly at how that relationship can let authors create simulated content management systems.)

Time permitting, we'll also discuss master projects, skins, and different ways to create single source-customized tables of contents. You'll have to bring a laptop equipped with the latest version of Flare, and a few other requirements for which you'll get instructions before the conference.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• Review what "single sourcing" is, and look at a fairly new, potentially confusing definition of the term
• Get an overview of all Flare's single sourcing features to help you decide which ones to use in your projects
• Try three of these features hands-on to see their effects
• Review several other single sourcing features in more depth, time permitting
• Look at how the single sourcing features let you use Flare beyond standard online help or documentation, specifically to create simulated content management systems for practice before buying the real thing

Tuesday

11:10am - 12:10pm

Most DITA implementations start with the DITA Open Toolkit (OT) being used for publishing of DITA content. The Open Toolkit is almost famous for its arcane "interface", and its impenetrability to beginners. There are good reasons for this situation; the OT is designed to be "platform-agnostic", is intended to be integrated with other applications, and takes advantage of other arcane open source tools with weird names such as Ant, FOP, Xalan and Saxon.

WinANT Echidna, albeit with a weird name itself, was designed to provide a simple Windows interface to the DITA OT publishing functionality. Over time, more and more features have been added to WinANT Echida, such that it now supports pre-defined "skins" for HTML-based outputs and "layouts" for PDF output, provides some simple project management functions, allows control of conditional processing (ditaval), and comprehensive OT diagnostics. It even allows you to install the Open Toolkit and plug-ins from within the WinANT Echidna interface. In this session, the creator of WinANT Echidna (now open source) will explain the application and its features.

DITA's Open Source Friends presentation looks at the free tools and environments used to build dynamic and interactive user assistance. Using DITA, Eclipse, IBM Task Modeler, Flexbuilder and PHP MySQL to add a feedback loop where users can add comments, make suggestions, and interact - all in an enhanced rich internet experience environment. This is a technical writer focused approach with a hands-on strategy. The demo provides basis for your own experiments based on the easily obtained tools and methodology that Web 2.0 uses. At the core of course is XML with some nice Ant scripts for the build.

Building Your Own AIR Help Application

Tuesday

Scott Prentice, Leximation, Inc. • Hands-on, Double Session

11:10am - 2:25pm

Adobe's new AIR technology is ideally suited for the delivery of online user assistance. An AIR application is cross platform (Mac, Windows, and Linux) and provides an embedded web browser component which means that your CSS and JavaScript coding is designed for a single browser. These features alone provide a huge benefit for development and testing. Sure, you can use RoboHelp or Flare to export an AIR-based help system, but neither of these options offer much in the way of customization. If you want to create that Help system of your dreams, you'll have to build it yourself! The great thing about AIR development is that you can do a lot with very little; start with the basics, then add more as needed. In this workshop you will build your own custom AIR Help system using your own content, and return to work with a fully functional prototype.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• How to install and configure the open source tools for developing and building AIR applications
• How to create a self-signed digital certificate to allow installation of your AIR application on other computers
• How to plan and design an AIR application interface
• About the fundamentals of ActionScript and MXML coding and development
• How to read XML and HTML content from a local or remote file system

Software Simulations with Adobe Captivate

Wednesday

Alan Houser, Group Wellesley, Inc. • Hands-on, Double Session

8:30 - 10:50am

Most people use Adobe Captivate to create demonstrations and assessments. An overlooked and powerful feature of Captivate is its ability to create software simulations, in which the user interacts with a realistic simulation of the software interface. Software simulations can be valuable for training, for testing, or even for rapid-prototyping of user interaction.

This hands-on workshop will focus on Adobe Captivate features for creating simulations. After a brief introduction to Adobe Captivate, including user interface and concepts, we will create and modify software simulations. We will create both training and assessment simulations. Finally, we will discuss how to set up Adobe Captivate projects so that you can easily publish demonstrations, training simulations, or assessment simulations from the same project.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• The types of Adobe Captivate projects and how they differ
• How to automatically record software simulations, and later modify those simulations
• How to create software simulations "from scratch" with still screen shots by adding Adobe Captivate objects
• How to modify your Adobe Captivate project to create a more realistic and pleasing simulation

Wednesday

8:30 - 9:30am

Learn some hard-won strategies and principles for converting content from multiple legacy formats (like RoboHTML, Framemaker, and Word) to DITA-compliant XML sources. Learn general methods for addressing real-world conditional content in the DITA XML sources. The session also will demonstrate examples of the content before and after conversion, including the conditional models used in both. There are many pitfalls and problems in this type of conversion, but no problem is insurmountable. Learn about a real world success story that allows consistent publishing to multiple formats, faster product support, and less costly translation support.

Learn how one company transitioned the authoring of product documentation from FrameMaker and FlashHelp to a Confluence wiki. Hear about our goals and reasons for moving to a wiki, our conversion to wiki process, the solutions we've implemented for managing and developing wiki documentation, our experimentation with open, collaborative authoring and editing. Take a look at our product documentation in a wiki. See how we structure our documentation, how we manage images, context-sensitive links, workflows for authoring, reviewing, and approving, permissions, outputs, etc. See techniques we use to track changes and manage the development of product documentation in a wiki. And more.

Flare Tips and Tricks

Wednesday

Scott DeLoach, ClickStart

8:30 - 9:30am

This session will show you how to get the most out of MadCap Flare. We will discuss best practices for designing stylesheets, using condition tags, developing page layouts, and reusing content. I will also share new, never-before-seen tips and with examples that you can reuse in your own projects.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• How to create character styles
• How to use advanced printed documentation features, including headers and footers, chapter breaks, and auto numbering
• How to create nonscrolling regions and nonscrolling table headers
• How to efficiently use condition tags, variables, and snippets
• How to use the "hidden" features in Flare

Techniques for Using Acrobat More Effectively

Wednesday

Alan Houser, Group Wellesley, Inc.

9:50 - 10:50am

PDF has become a de facto file format for publishing, with more than 275 million PDF documents on the Web. The free Adobe Reader is the most popular installed software. While Adobe Reader is free, Adobe makes money by selling software for creating PDF documents - Adobe Acrobat Standard, Acrobat Pro, and Acrobat Pro Extended. Many people create PDF documents with little attention to the capabilities of these tools for supporting the review, approval, and publishing phases of the documentation lifecycle. For those who have never explored the capabilities of Adobe Acrobat, or for those looking for a refresher overview, this session will provide new insights into how you can use Adobe Acrobat more effectively.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• How Adobe Acrobat can support the document review and approval process, including shared reviews
• Basics of PDF editing, including Acrobat editing tools, page-level editing, adding headers and footers, and combining PDF documents
• How to add navigation aids to documents, including hyperlinks and navigation buttons
• How to optimize PDF documents for publishing, and how to create PDF portfolios